They have enjoyed all the excellence of wine-in-a-box. Too often, what starts with a flame ends as soot.

So a new report from the Pew Research Center offers hope for humans in search of true and abiding love.

For in "AI, Robotics And The Future Of Jobs" (PDF), one of the experts surveyed predicts that, in 2025, many of us will have robot lovers. No, not those who are human and merely go through the motions because they have a ring on their finger and a joint bank account.

No, these will be actual robots that will know our every need and minister to it accordingly.

The report, released last week, canvassed the views of experts. As we know with experts, they are always right. Especially in their own minds. So this is as sure a picture as we can have of our loving and lovable future.

Robots will, it seems, threaten current jobs more than ever. These won't merely be jobs that require automation. These will be jobs of the white-collar variety, those that involve a touch of politics, as well as a heap of patience.

Almost half the experts believe that the advance of robot deployment will mean the advance of human unemployment. They fear greater income inequality, and even heightened social disorder.

Some differ. Salesforce's JP Rangaswami, for example, insists that: "The effects will be different in different economies (which themselves may look different from today's political boundaries). Driven by revolutions in education and in technology, the very nature of work will have changed radically--but only in economies that have chosen to invest in education, technology,and related infrastructure."

Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft's principal researcher, believes technology has always been a net jobs creator. He said: "Although there have always been unemployed people, when we reached a few billion people there were billions of jobs. There is no shortage of things that need to be done and that will not change

But let's be optimistic. There will be vast numbers of people with little to do. They will need far more love -- or, at least, lovin' -- than ever before.

That's where, one expert surveyed for the report suggests, robots may be a salvation. Stowe Boyd, lead researcher for GigaOM Research, predicts: "Robotic sex partners will become commonplace, although the source of scorn and division, the way that critics today bemoan selfies as an indicator of all that's wrong with the world."

Will there be scorn and division? Or will there be blessed relief at the simplicity of it all? The robot will never stand you up, always listen to everything you say without even a whisper of disagreement, and will happily turn over and go to sleep if you happen not to be in the mood.